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Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

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Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#311

Post by binarysolo »

sidlls wrote: post #298

My wife has run a business for some time on Amazon. It's not big, mainly for baby related products. She's in the process of issuing removal orders for all the stuff in their warehouses and will discontinue the business there. Partly this is due to the numerous cheap knockoffs and imitations of things she worked pretty hard to source quality materials and manufacturing for driving prices into the dirt, partly it's due…

Baby (category) is tricky - you can bet that she's getting all sorts of approval things because some cheapass Chinese product poisoned some kid and now Amazon has to really put pressure on all the legit existing vendors to have MSDS sheets and whatever relevant testing sheets nowadays.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#313

Post by binarysolo »

tyingq wrote: post #146
jschwartzi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that Amazon wants an automated process, which is fundamentally incompatible with how sales works. You can't reliably go through and identify all of the products you sell by trademark and verify that the pricing is within a certain reasonable percentage of the seller's price or MSRP. And if there's no posted MSRP you're stuck assessing the market price based on how much others have paid for the sam…

I'm not convinced they have automated processes for simple stuff like "> 500 sold AND > 50% returned"

They do. 4% triggers an automated-ish warning and 10% triggers a serious notification which usually gets scrutinized by some Amazon member -- this happens inconsistently on low volume long tail items too which cause sellers massive ammounts of grief (example: we sell a bath robe from XXXS-XXXL and sold tens of thousands of units, but 5 XXXS items of which 2 were returned and labeled as "not as described" (which puts the return cost on us instead of the consumer), this triggers a Performance Notification and suddenly our entire account - 40M in sales in 5k SKUs is now at risk of shutting down.

It's weird that it happens very inconsistently; we've also had store accounts which have 20% return rate on 1000s of items (pallet got damaged somewhere along shipping and crushed 20% of product) and just get an automated notice and no followup.

source: Amazon seller

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#314

Post by abakker »

download13 wrote: post #210
habosa wrote: post #77

My favorite Amazon scam is the Amazon Ship of Theseus[0]. You sell a product, normally a cheap electronic, and build up a decent corpus of positive reviews. A good example is a USB-C cable or something. Then you decide you want to sell a new product in a more competitive subcategory, like Bluetooth Headphones. You then take the _existing_ listing and change it piece by piece. First the pictures, then the title, then…

There's also a more subtle version of this, where the seller leaves the listing the same, but once enough positive reviews have accumulated they move production to a cheaper factory and use cheaper materials. So you might see older reviews for a pair of boots that say they're made from sturdy materials with good stitching, followed by later reviews saying that they didn't match the advertised sizing and pictures, or…

The term for this is "Quality Fade" and is by no means unique to amazon. This is a very common thing in all low-cost manufacturing. you start with higher quality and lower margin, and gradually degrade quality to improve margin. You consistently flirt with the lowest quality possible.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#315

Post by m463 »

samstave wrote: post #236
Glyptodon wrote: post #64

Forget counterfeits for a second. Even trying to find something like an ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon is like straight going through AliExpress. But wait! Unless you're buying a very very expensive lab model all the "name brands" look to be sourcing the same way and adding a label too. So the name brands are AliExpress with maybe better QC and 200% markup. But wait! Even looking everywhere else it's the same situation…

You know what AliExpress service I actually want. I want to pick a quarterly amount that I would like to pay for a "surprise box" of curated items within a few categories that I select. So, lets say, I want to spend $100/qtr. And I say I want my grab-bag to come from categories/interests (max 3) XYZ. Then I get a box every quarter with surprise stuff. Start the service small. two verticals "things" and "projects" I c…

It seems like you're asking for what Amazon is being criticized for in this article? :)

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#316

Post by blago »

tracker1 wrote: post #253
cm2187 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most reviews aren’t seller specific. What I see is reviews for a product, but some of the sellers for that product will sell a counterfeit version (Intel NIC in my case). The top (default) seller when the reviews were written may be replaced by a bad actor a couple of years later.

Because amazon doesn't add seller stickers/labels it's nearly impossible for them to even determine the seller if it's "Fulfilled by Amazon" ... I tend to stick to the "Sold by Amazon" or "Sold and shipped by MFG" because at least with Amazon, returns become easy and/or I trust orders from MFG slightly more than otherwise.

> Because amazon doesn't add seller stickers/labels it's nearly impossible for them to even determine the seller if it's "Fulfilled by Amazon"

You are referring to mingled inventory which the seller has to opt into explicitly when they decide how to sell their product.

This is not the default, and in my experience, very few sellers choose this option. Most of the inventory is labeled with Amazon-proprietary bar codes that identify the seller.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#317

Post by m463 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #11

Amazon's fulfilment has also become shockingly bad. Most items are shipped in lightly-padded manila envelopes resulting in high percentage of damaged goods if you order books[1], CDs/DVDs/BluRays, video games, or anything else where the packaging is part of the product. eBay is a much better experience in this regard. [1] In an ironic twist, I absolutely refuse to buy books from Amazon anymore.

I recently bought a new book from amazon, and it was thrown in with the rest of my order, causing the pages to be folded over at an angle. sigh.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#318

Post by m463 »

AmVess wrote: post #91
AlexandrB wrote: post #11

Amazon's fulfilment has also become shockingly bad. Most items are shipped in lightly-padded manila envelopes resulting in high percentage of damaged goods if you order books[1], CDs/DVDs/BluRays, video games, or anything else where the packaging is part of the product. eBay is a much better experience in this regard. [1] In an ironic twist, I absolutely refuse to buy books from Amazon anymore.

I received two nvme ssd's in a padded envelope. They could easily have been destroyed. They delivered a $500 video card by slapping a shipping sticker on the product box and shipping it that way. On the other hand, I received a $12 box of wet wipes that came in a giant, nicely padded box. The product itself was in a sturdy box. $400 dollars worth of computer storage was shipped improperly, but Amazon made sure I got…

I ordered two cr2032 cells, and received them in a huge box with a lithium battery sticker. I suspected the box was chosen so large because of the sticker size, not the product size (which was about 1"x2"x1/8")

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#319

Post by m463 »

Havoc wrote: post #106
Timberwolf wrote: post #83

There are some categories of product I'm no longer willing to buy from Amazon: power cables, replacement chargers and batteries being the biggest offenders. They're such a minefield of fakery and shortcuts that are outright dangerous (e.g. UK plugs lacking fuses and with pins the wrong shape/size) that I'd rather have the extra work and expense of going to a local shop where I can inspect what I'm buying.

>power cables, replacement chargers and batteries being the biggest offenders. I've found Anker gear to be consistently solid on all three counts & frankly I trust it more than store bought. If I could even get it - wouldn't know where to start buying a 60W USB hub in a brick & mortar.

I've been wondering how long it will be before anker gear is counterfeited.

Re: Amazon’s quest for more, cheaper products has resulted in a flea market of fakes

#320

Post by ycombinete »

mortenjorck wrote: post #50

There's a lot of emphasis in this article on counterfeits of luxury goods sold at obviously counterfeit prices (like the Hermès for 5% of genuine retail), but not much on the far more insidious (and seemingly pervasive, in my experience) general merchandise counterfeits sold for what is often not a suspiciously big discount. Categories like kitchen or yard tools are absolutely rife with counterfeits. As an example, s…

Tbh, at this point I don’t buy anything I that a value authenticity in from non-official distributors. I’ll go to the brands web page, and find their list of official resellers and buy from them only.
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